While other MediaPost newsletters and articles remain free to all ... our new Research Intelligencer service is reserved for paid subscribers ...

Subscribe today to gain access to the every Research Intelligencer article we publish as well as the exclusive daily newsletter, full access to The MediaPost Cases, first-look research and daily insights from Joe Mandese, Editor in Chief.

Around the Net

Price Fixing? Google Already Does It

One of the primary concerns that advertisers have voiced about the posed Google-Yahoo search deal is that Google will be able to "fix" bid prices for search terms across the board -- and users will
have no real alternative for their paid search traffic. But Danny Sullivan argues that Big G has been fixing paid search prices for years.

"How can that be, given that it's an
auction model?" Sullivan says. "In an auction, the highest price wins. Since AdWords began, Google's never sold to the highest bidder." The winner is calculated through a mix of factors, including bid
price and the ever-elusive Quality Score. And because Google alone determines Quality Scores in a somewhat opaque manner, Sullivan says that the giant is essentially manipulating all the prices
already.

"Let's be clear: Quality scores mean advertisers with ads deemed 'good' pay less," he says. "But the bottom line is that Google is interfering in the auction in ways only
it knows."